Litecoin (LTC) Foundation To Cooperate with Beam to Explore Mimblewimble for Confidential Transactions

Charlie Lee, Founder and Managing Director of the Litecoin foundation, has on numerous instances mentioned on twitter about plans of adding Confidential Transactions through a soft-fork on the LTC blockchain. According to Mr. Lee, fungibility is the only property of sound money lacking from both Bitcoin and Litecoin. By adding Confidential transactions, LTC will be more fungible.

Fungibility is defined as the ability of a good or asset to be interchanged with other individual goods or assets of the same type. Fungible assets are exchangeable for each other and simplify the exchange and trade processes, as fungibility implies equal value between the assets.

Litecoin Foundation To Cooperate with Beam to Explore Mimblewimble for Confidential Transactions

In one of his latest tweets, Charlie Lee informed the Litecoin and crypto communities that the foundation has been chatting with the team at Beam Privacy.

Team has been chatting with the @vcorem and @beamprivacy team about MimbleWimble on Litecoin with Extension Blks. Pleasantly surprised that Beam has already implemented switch-commitments w/ ElGamal. It’s a safety switch to protect against quantum computing breaking CT soundness.

It is with this background that the team at Beam Privacy has announced that they have been approached by the Litecoin Foundation about a possible cooperation in implementing Mimblewimble via Extension blocks on Litecoin. The team at Beam is focused on enhancing privacy in the cryptocurrency space. They also added that they have already started exploring adding the feature on the Litecoin network.

We have started exploration towards adding privacy and fungibility to Litecoin by allowing on-chain conversion of regular LTC into a Mimblewimble variant of LTC and vice versa. Upon such conversion, it will be possible to transact with Mimblewimble LTC in complete confidentiality.

It is our joint intention to publish any and all the work done as part of the project under a permissive open source license to let the community benefit from it.

What Exactly is Mimblewimble?

Mimblewimble technology was named after a Harry Potter spell that stops people from spilling secrets. In the case of blockchain technology, Mimblewimble stops blockchains from exposing personal information.

The Bitcoin network exposes three ‘secrets’ in each transaction: sender’s address, amount sent and receiver’s address. Mimblewimble aims at hiding transaction amounts by multiplying the value of the transaction with a secret ‘big’ number only known to the sender and receiver.

Mimblewimble is ideal for Confidential Transactions that obfuscate the amounts being transacted over the network but not where the coins are being sent.

What are your thoughts on Beam Privacy and the Litecoin Foundation collaborating to explore the possibility of Mimblewimble on the Litecoin network? Is it achievable? Please let us know in the comment section below.

[Feature image courtesy of Beam on Medium.com]

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